Warmth coated her like a soft jacket, wreathing her exposed skin with invisible comfort that beat back the cold she was supposed to feel. Her eyes, shining like silver coins in the night, stared out into the bleak whiteness of the storm that enveloped the Bastion, drowning visibility beyond ten feet at most. The snow whipped around like a slaver's tool, and the ice pelted the stonework in shards that should have speared it but only melted the second they touched the construct. Jira watched it, intent and seething, questioning over and over why and why this place was the way it was.

The stone should have been frozen over with frost, her flesh corroded by the bite, and her organs paralyzed with cold. Food transported from the bakehouse should have rotted solid in the air. Yet, it didn't. It wasn't. For all its effort, the storm accomplished nothing of the sort.

Even as she stood in the center of the outer bailey wearing only gray breeches and a loose-fitting shirt, hit by plowing winds and sharpened hoar, she only felt warmth and the rhythm of her heartbeat.

It never made sense to her how this place could be so strong with arcaeno yet show none of it aside from those meandering sprites in the fields and forests below. Even those had lessened in the days since the invasion and the abrupt fall of the rebellion, driven away as the corruption of the land drew closer and closer from the ruins of Jore. Even that breathing orb of brilliant sapphire was missing. It makes no sense. Not since seven years ago. Seven years, broken and in hiding. Cowardly.

Jira could laugh at how humorous it was that she had come here on the orders of Duke Oudet and lamented it - wishing that she had just moved to Holmgan before the rebellion and completed her mission. Now, this was the only place that kept her alive, and it confused her still. In fact, part of her was infuriated by it. It gave the inhabitants a sense of normality that they should not have felt. She was angered at how the remaining cooks, guards, servants, and laborers could just continue their duties to Lord Kahlim as if the rest of the kingdom hadn't fallen to disorder. As if they weren't the lone bulwark against insanity.

How Jira ne'Jiral wished for the inquisitive Orlantha Quills to show up at that moment and do whatever it was that she intended to do. Kill her, question her, maim her, torture her. Anything to end this failure of a quest she had accepted from Father. But she was gone. Dead, exiled, imprisoned - just like their glorious Duke. Just like the bear-maiden. Just like the Green Dragons in their entirety. The Duke's Warhounds. The Ashen Shields. The Virtuous Bulls. The Auric Eagles. The Emerald Glaives.

All gone. More of an undeserving fate than the traitorous bastards. The Eye - or the Blessed Harbingers as they liked to be called again. Jira spat on the stonework beneath her bare feet at the thought of them, watching the saliva fill the cracks and not freeze over. So easily returned to the fold, forgetting them as one of the most rebellious of the bunch. The prodigal children of the King, turning their faith over to his hands, proclaiming to have been healed from the wicked ways of Oudet.

Jira could only blame Mille the Wolf and the Duke's councilors for not telling the rest of the army what the King had done in the first place - though she could also blame the guilds for so easily following their fellows into rebellion based on the words: "the worst crimes imaginable against God Almighty" and "the purest examples of how corruptively evil King Aslofidor is." Accusations that had little known evidence besides the occasional public character of the King, but Duke Oudet was a man far more than capable of rallying the people to his causes.

Jira could also blame herself for, in her way, rallying to his cause instead of doing the riskier but ultimately better option of joining the King. If Mille and the Duke had told them all, perhaps this whole idiocy could have been avoided and thousands wouldn't be dead. Jore wouldn't be their monument. Gíla Arsinoe wouldn't be missing, taken by whatever that sapphire brilliance was that no one else saw.

She could be back home in the Desert. Not scrounging away a meager living in the mountains, striking out only when it was safest to get more supplies. She could be living. She could be alive.

"Captain Jira!" cried a voice. The silver knight spun around and saw Hilda Ackerg rushing toward her, Karlyle Robion and Farrimond Sampson hot on her heels. "Captain! Sarda is calling a meeting. His excavation uncovered something."

They traveled by cart, acquired from some farmer who didn't need it anymore. The horses were clothed in protective layers from the rainfall beat down on the travelers with unrelenting heat. An acidic burn born from the crater that was once Jore to the immediate east. The sky was chokingly black without a single speck of light to be seen for miles and miles, polluted with that unrelenting fetid stench. Grasslands were an airless blue, stinging to the touch with the texture of ashy flesh, stinging like jellyfish tendrils. Trees were charred black by the growing smog roiling from the sunken city of bones, sweeping across the uncivilized places like a wave of the dead. It was sweltering in its assault on the world, the rain drawing sweat from her body even through the layers of her jacket and hat. At times, she could swear that she felt the liquid sizzling on her clothing, though no marks or burns could be seen. Purely in her mind, she said to herself. A trick played by the evil of the King's new church, led by that red-robed man.

That bishop.

She knew of him more as the years had gone by since his arrival in Holmgan, declaring an end to his pilgrimage and a more fervent study of the divine and this new world of the arcaen so brought to fruition by the King himself. From the young and the old and the foreign, she heard of his exploits in leading the masses on how to better serve the Almighty, proclaiming the arcaeno as His blessed energies and how they must use it for good. Use it. To not let it roam mindlessly, passively. Words he truly believed. Words his flock believed. Even the Matriarch Cardinal, so long removed from her homeland on the Divine Path, could not deny the sway of his rhetoric according to tavern rumor. Upon a time, she would have discounted tavern rumor as its namesake, but now, in this dark time, she could not deny its possible reality.

Orlantha felt that fearful pull once more as she thought of it and felt it deepen as she thought of her new mission.

"How long will it be? Before he dies?" she asked her companion. She had him this a few times already but felt it necessary to ensure that he could keep whatever story he was telling her straight.

Milligan turned his head toward his companion, who sat on the bench uncomfortably close to him. Uncomfortable for her, at least. Orlantha could not be certain if the man shared such opinions on the matter. His handling of women in the few days they had traveled together was uncouth at best, and she had grown a singular distrust of him regarding personal space - a distrust added to her already present distrust of the man.

Orlantha was at least grateful that she was decidedly less muddy and vulnerable than she was during their first encounter in the forest. Clean, protected by her armor - not coated in the muck and the blood of Caerux Cain, whose deformed head rested in a sack behind the pair with the rest of their equipment and items. "It's necessary for where we're going," he had told her. She surmised it was an intimidation tactic initially, but this "Milligan" was nothing if not unhinged in his approach to situations. A stream of shattered limbs and ruined bandit groups told that particular story.

"Three years. Give or take. But we're not going to let that happen," he answered, looking back ahead with a glint in his eye. Orlantha shifted in her seat and gave a polite - necessary - wave to a mounted man passing by. One out of hundreds, a host of people traveling the road with them - unaligned to their story but together all the same. Individual souls wandering the Divine Road, going about their insignificant lives unaware of the true powers that be.

To them, the past seven years had only been a short, momentary violent uprising with decidedly honorable intentions but ultimately ignorant expectations. The only thing the former Duke's rebellion saw was a return to form for national alliances and the evolution of the faith set by Aslofidor the First. But to a woman like Orlantha Quills, the past seven years were hell itself, shattering all she held dear.

They had traveled for some days now since their encounter in the forest, and he had taken a strict endeavor to learn of his new companion and what he saw in her. Paramount on the list of questions he had for her was why she was so willing to believe him when he told her of his father. Her answer had been as curious as it was depressing. "I already lost everything because of belief. What else can I lose besides my life by falling into its enamoring snare once more?"

Orlantha opened the satchel to the right of her and pulled out the folded parchment map of the central nations of Khirn. Aslofidor lay in the center, its major roads marked in long black lines, with Dekun laying on the east with similar details, as well as Veoris to the north, Belanore to the south and southeast, and Tahrir to the west and southwest. "How long until we reach Veoris?" she asked, tracing her finger northward along the representation of the Divine Road.

Milligan cleared his throat and looked at the map sprawled over her knees, watching it get wetter and wetter from the rain. "You should put that away. And I would guess, if we keep this pace, two months, maybe three, if that."

Orlantha folded the map up and put it back in her satchel. "Do you not have an exact time?"

"I don't know, I'm not a damned cartographer. I just walk until I get to where I want to be. Besides, you lived here before. Shouldn't you know?"

She settled back on the bench and shook her head. "I've only had the opportunity of going to Dekun and Belanore upon a time."

"Oh, great. Well, be prepared if those months turn longer. Veoris has some of the strictest borders I've ever encountered."

"Will they not let us pass?"

Milligan clicked his tongue and waved to another mounted individual who waved back far too happily. "Do you remember how cruel they were when they invaded this place? How singularly minded in brutality they were?"

"Yes. Their less civilized kin have infested the forests and grasslands as barbarians, as well."

"Well, they're worse with guarding their borders. Even those walking the Divine Road have trouble passing through it. They hold the only northern passage by land out of central Khirn. Multiple roads, but the only way north. The invasion only worsened them, and that's not including how strict they are with their religion. Strong belief in it. Thinks they get power from their Gods because of it."

Orlantha made a face, dark and somber, and she looked away to the desolate landscape - remembering. "Maybe they do."

Sarda snickered. "Maybe they do."

Ten people stood in the dimly lit war chamber of Sarda Kahlim. Ten eagerly awaiting to hear what the Lord the Star Bastion had discovered in his frantic excavations of the mountain holdfast. "We found a tunnel," was his answer.

The silence was overpowering, so deafening that Jira could not even hear her heartbeat. Antechambers, rooms of various sizes, and staircases had been at the forefront of discovery for the past seven years, progress slowed by the limited manpower available to the former Baron of Aslofidor.

"You found a tunnel?" someone finally asked. Jira was uncertain who it was. She stared at Sarda Kahlim with an almost slack-jawed expression, unable how to process even a moment of possibly beneficial progress. The Lord of the Star Bastion's face was bright with excitement, his yellowing teeth flashing underneath the scraggly black beard that had grown bush-thick over the past seven years. His eyes darted between her and the table with an ever-developing schematic of the Bastion, the lids rapid firing blinking like an addict too far gone from his vice. Jira looked at him with pity and then looked to Mille standing by him - her face was shrouded by the same pain. Cowled in darkness, eyes dry and stinging with exhaustion, lips downturned in a tight-closed grimace. Of all the people to suffer from the invasion, Jira considered the Wolf to have been the greatest among them, with Sarda a close second. Whatever plans the Lord had been producing in his greed-addled mind were laid low by the invasion, and the Wolf had only seen her predictions come true in the worst possible light.

"Yes!" Sarda exclaimed, practically bouncing on his feet. His voice was higher pitched than it once had been, though still had the dignity of a nobleman. Jira could respect that he had at least held onto that. "We have been digging for-for years and we now have actual progress. Not just more chambers and empty rooms. An actual path towards something....something! And the architecture alone is so vastly different from what we've uncovered already."

Jira looked back to Mille. "It's unlike any tunnel I've seen," the Wolf said. "The chambers and rooms are smooth white stone if weathered in some spots. But this tunnel is textured and..."

"And what?" Jira asked.

"It looks like a vein if nothing else," the Wolf said, tapping on her exposed wrist. "It's rounded, coiling, the stone tinged red, and it has this stench of iron. Not the metal, but blood."

Jira heard Hilda shiver. "Maybe there's a corpse somewhere down there. Of the previous inhabitants."

"The cold may have preserved them," added Karlyle.

"What cold?" Jira asked, sighing heavily as a myriad of ideas invaded her mind. "It's warm here, Karl. Always warm, you know that."

"Arcaeno is strong here," the Wolf muttered, mimicking Jira's own comments.

"Yes, which is why this is a monumental discovery!" Sarda beamed. "Perhaps it is a passageway to one of the vaults of artifacts. Or something even greater. Something that could help us regain what we lost. Win the rebellion at long last."

Everyone was silent again, unsure of what to say. Jira's pulse quickened against her temples as she thought of what to add to the conversation. The idea of striking back with a treasure hidden in the Bastion was enticing - a chance to fight the insanity - but the look in Sarda's eyes told her how terrible an idea it was to leave it in his hands alone. It would have to be a joint effort.

Farrimond Sampson spoke before she could. "If there is a weapon down there, are we sure it is the wisest thing to use it?" he asked. His voice was roughly accented but politely toned, and Jira felt a comfort around the man she had once only felt in the presence of Gíla Arsinoe - bless her soul so that she rest in peace.

"What else can we do, Farrimond?" asked Sarda.

"Not use it?" Farrimond answered, his voice dropping to an unsure whisper.

Sarda scoffed. "Discover a great power but not use it? That's stupidity. The King's army uses it, they beat us with it. I knew we should have done the same when I saw those sprites in the fields below."

Farrimond bowed his head. "After what I have seen, my Lord, I believe it is safest to not use a force that could damn our souls from His Heaven."

Sarda sniffed almost disdainfully. "It will not damn you from God's Heaven, boy. Reynfred and-"

"Regardless if Reynfred and his Eye believe they are still righteous, that power can only corrupt," Farrimond declared. "I've seen it. I do not believe we should use it if it exists down there."

"After everything that has happened, you would stand by and ignore the possible answer to our plight?"

"With respect, Lord Kahlim, but you did not see what we saw when the King unleashed his power," Hilda countered, stepping in for her companion. Jira smiled with small admiration - seven years had grown the once timid woman into a person who believed in herself, capable of standing up for those close to her. "We saw the fall of Jore and the Warhounds; may they rest for their bravery. We saw the mutilation of the Bulls for their defiance at the Mammoth Range. We saw thousands be taken into the earth. Thousands more were crushed by pillars of stone or torn apart by hands of dirt and mud. We saw hundreds of our allies be burned."

"Casualties of a war we all agreed was just before you all failed!" Sarda burst, slamming his palms on the table. "We have been held up in here for seven years, surviving on our stockpiles, praying to whatever God or Gods we believe in to survive another day more for something, anything to help us fight back and take down the wrongdoers who have destroyed our lives and continue to sin against the world. Now, it may be presented to us, and you are afraid to use it because of how it was used against you? We are six hundred strong against a collective force of hundreds of thousands. We cannot win that way. The land is growing more and more decayed by whatever horror they used to destroy Jore, and they excuse it as God's Will to bring about a new world from its moldering corpse. The air is sick with stench, the rain draws suffocating fever. It will only worsen if we do not act! We must act! You have all been raised under the guidelines of your God Almighty, but where is he now? Where is the enforcement of the ancient laws of the arcaen laid down by Aslofidor the First? Where? God let the King and his men use arcaeno in spite of those laws and it worked! It worked. The people have flocked to him and say that it is miracle! Well then, let this be our miracle!"

Hilda remained quiet, as did Farrimond, Mille, and the rest. It was a pervasive silence that lasted for minutes, and it was Jira who spoke up at last. "My friends," she said. "I know you are all hurt and broken by these years of hiding and not knowing where to go. What to do. But, Lord Kahlim is right. We must use any and every advantage to take back what we lost. To show the people of this land that they need not follow a man like Aslofidor or his new church. I vote we go down the tunnel, face whatever lies within, and keep going until we find what we need to win and kill those sons of bitches."